


convictions

by Trell (orphan_account)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Past Abuse, Punk Hazard Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 10:35:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4518573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Her sneer is bitter. “We didn’t all have Cora to play savior for us.” </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	convictions

You don’t expect them.

The assertion that they’re your enemies comes out of your mouth almost before you can think, reflexive, the moment they’re in your line of sight. Anyone who still casts their lot in with Joker is an enemy, and they are no exception. 

They are still _his_ , loyal despite time, years of unknowns erased by the jolly roger sewn into the hem of Baby Five’s dress. Enemies and dangers, your history together meaningless in the face of your revolt. 

The Strawhats’ navigator blasts them out of the sky.

There’s nothing intentional about how impassively you watch them plunge into the sea, no steeling yourself against reaction; only a peculiar numbness that settles in your chest and doesn’t budge, keeps you standing blandly by while the Strawhats pull the two of them onto the shore. The swordsman leaves them piled near where the oil tanker has been moored, shackled with sea stone and slumped against each other, unconscious, deathly pale.

You don’t care. You don’t mean to allow yourself to do so, refuse to let sentimentality worm itself back into your heart when you’ve got so little time to carry out your final goal; you’ll use them to send your message and then you’ll leave them, kill them if they stand in your way, move on just as you’d planned.

Extracting the methamphetamines from the children freed from the laboratory provides a brief but suitable distraction, complex beyond your usual work. Tracking down the molecules in their blood takes all your concentration, everything you’ve learned about using your power to see the smallest components of your surroundings; hunting down the particles in their brains and evening the balance to alleviate their symptoms takes still more. You guess far more than you’d like, wish fervently for controlled studies, but they walk out smiling, and you can only take that as a hopeful sign. 

It keeps you from thinking about Baby Five and Buffalo for almost two hours, a respite you know full well you don’t deserve; a respite that comes to an end the moment you step out of your makeshift O.R. and find the long-nosed sniper looking for you, wary, there to deliver the news that the two have woken.

You breathe in, and out, and close your eyes; and then, while the others busy themselves with sorting out who’s who and feeding the troops and making preparations, you bite the proverbial bullet and trudge down to the shore.

The minute you step into the secluded inlet where they lie you can feel Baby Five’s eyes on you, burning with fury. “Law,” she says, her voice hoarse with the aftershocks of the Strawhat navigator’s attack, stifled by the way she’s lying awkwardly against the boulder behind her, “how could you, how dare you, what are you thinking, he’ll _kill_ you.”

Whether this last is a threat or a show of concern isn’t something you dare to consider. Still numb, caught so firmly between anger and guilt that neither can reach you, you say, “Not if I kill him first,” stride up to stand over them, your sword held tightly in hand. “He sent you for Caesar?”

Beside Baby Five Buffalo mumbles, “Yes,” but she overrides him, says, “Who cares? Have you lost your mind, going against him? You owe him _everything_.”

That’s all it takes. Your deadened calm, so easily broken, snaps instantly over to fury: “I owe him nothing. Fuck-all save his demise.” 

“Fool,” Baby Five spits, “stupid,” and you step suddenly closer, go for your weapon—

—and she cringes, shrinks back; and it’s like you’re both children again, her trying get a rise out of you and regretting it the moment she succeeds, only—

Only this time she’s bound, helpless, and you’re standing there with all the power of life and death in your hands.

It isn’t a game anymore, and the realization that you’re the villain in this picture is so sudden and harsh that you almost stagger; step hurriedly back, all the same, your anger replaced with cold horror. She stares up at you, surprised, perhaps, by the change, and you stare back: and for a long moment there’s only silence, both of you frozen, halted as though you’ve found yourselves unexpectedly on thin ice. 

You don’t know where the words that tumble out of you next come from, haven’t even the presence of mind to regret them. “Why didn’t you leave?” you say, and your voice is hardly there at all, dangerously close to falling away and leaving you to signing and frustration. “Why did you stay with him? Thirteen years . . .”

You trail off, overwhelmed by the enormity of that time-span, humbled by the magnitude of what they must have endured. 

The sneer she answers with is deeply bitter. “We didn’t all have Cora to play savior for us.” 

Your breath leaves you as surely as if she'd struck you, landed a perfectly-aimed blow. You manage to respond, “He wanted to save all of us. Both of you, too.”

“Only he didn’t,” says Baby Five, “did he.”

“He tried!” Your heart is hammering unexpectedly in your chest, your pulse rising, and you don't know what it is you fear. “When he left with me and he didn’t come back, why didn’t you go? Why did you—“

You waver backwards as she jerks herself forward, sits upright. “Do you hear yourself? When he _left_ us. When he left us, left with you, because you were the only one he cared enough to save.” 

“That’s not true,” you start, but your words are lost under her own:

“He wasn’t a saint. He didn’t save children, and he certainly didn’t try to save us. He saved _you_ , his golden child, and he left the rest of us to rot.”

Hearing something so viciously slanderous brings your own anger boiling back, overtakes the guilt, returns the volume to your voice. “He would have come back," you growl, "If Cora hadn’t been murdered, if Joker hadn’t _killed_ —“

“He betrayed the young master for you,” snarls Baby Five. “He betrayed all of us, and he did it only for you. It was only what he deserved.” 

The assertion is enough to shock you into silence, so absolutely unexpected is it to hear from her mouth. She, too, looks shocked to have said it, her expression caught between astonishment and anger, her voice is far less sure when she goes on, “You—it was all about you, and we were left on the wayside, and—the young master, he never left us. Never left you, either.”

An involuntary shudder crawls down your spine at that. “No,” you breathe, “he didn’t.”

No longer so irate, quieted, she finishes, "He was the only one that never abandoned us. Why would we leave him, after all that?” From beside her Buffalo makes an affirmative noise, his usual contribution to conversation between the two of you; he’s always been in her corner, more than could be said of you, for all that she may as well have been your _sister_ , your family, the closest to it that you had. 

Exhaustion seizes you, then; pulls you down to your knees in the sand before them, slides your eyes closed.

Slowly you work your sword in beside you, lean against it. When you speak it feels as though someone else is saying the words, you merely listening from afar: “If you stand in my way when I go after him, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you together with him.”

“We’d die for him,” Baby Five answers. “As he would for us.”

She’s wrong, you know, but you haven’t the energy to argue. Guilt chokes you, because you know the choices they’ve made aren’t their own, are the result of a lifetime under his power; but you’d do it, you’re sure of it, would strike them down if that was what it took. “Then you’ll die for him.”

Her gaze is level when you meet it, determined. She can’t know that she echoes your thoughts when she says, “Whatever it takes.”

After that—

It takes you twenty minutes to prepare a raft, ten to haul both of them over to it and tie them to the mast. Another two to ensure they’re both secure and plant the transponder snail with them, one to shove the raft into the sea, send it out beyond the tide, your warning to your demon, built of his own kin.

His kin, not yours; and the urge to label them as _family_ , that’s wrong, you see that now—

—only, only, _only_. After, standing alone on the shore, everything she said seems so dangerously close to _right_ ; so much so that it scares you, eats away at you even once they’re gone. Because you knew Cora but her words shook you anyway; because now the links between the pieces seem tenuous, your world made abruptly insecure. Your memory, so long your only trusted record, is no longer certain.

(And of course it was you that got Cora killed, you'd known that; but knowing it had been different from having someone else say it so plainly, different from being so definitively charged.)

The thought that you could be wrong, that your view might be as warped as you know theirs to be, that the conclusions you drew could be based on lies you told yourself: it chills you to the bone, terrifies you like nothing has in years. Your conviction is all that drives you; your knowledge that killing Joker is what must be done, your vengeance taken, that’s all that keeps you going, all you’ve had since you had _him_.

Staring out at the stormy sea past Punk Hazard, cold wind needling its way through your coat, you shake your head and you shut it out: will yourself to forget every word you heard, swallow with a throat gone dry and dwell only on your hurt, the last thing you can trust.

It is, you think, like clawing at a wound to ensure that you're still there, like pressing on a bruise to remind yourself what gave it: assurance from your torment, reality through pain.

Pain, at least, remains.


End file.
